If my grandma had balls...

Okay, cheap title to try to get you to click on the post. Guilty, as charged.

So, my old company, InPhase Technologies, kinda-sorta folded. Not quite officially, insofar as the corporate entity still exists. But it lost all its funding, then its assets were sold, and now the IP (intellectual property) has been bundled up and sold to a new company, Akonia Holographics.

Akonia is founded by several old InPhase folks, and I wish them all the best. I really do. But there were a series of really poorly-considered papers and articles posted on the bulletin board when I first worked there. My favorite, by far, was the first paper suggesting holographic storage as the next generation of data storage, displacing the current, unreliable technologies. It was from 1999, arguing we'd displace CDs.

No, wait, that's not right. It was from 1963. Nineteen-sixty-fucking-three!!! Then, there was also a paper from 2001 (this was in 2003, when I started), claiming that InPhase was 3-6 months away from their first product coming to market. Suffice to say, that one probably shouldn't have been in public, since we were saying 18 months to public product when I started, two years after that paper came out.

Then it was 18 months, then it was 2 years, then it was 18 months, then it was 6 months, then a year passed, and then I quit. Or something like that. 3 months later, the paychecks didn't show up. Then they did, then they didn't, blah blah blah.

So, one of my former coworkers at InPhase has stayed in contact with those guys. They're having a grand opening party this Friday, which I am truly regretful that I can't go to, for humor's sake, as well as to see a bunch of my former coworkers.

But he wants to go for business purposes, because, hey: they're going to build a laser, it'll need a bunch of optics, we make optics, blah blah blah. Suffice to say, I'm not banking on their product coming to market such that they have to buy enough optics to keep us in business! His response was "hey, if they get it working, it could be huge." To which the only proper response is the classic Yiddish answer to any hypothetical: and if my grandma had balls, she'd be my uncle.

Note to self: have to find the Yiddish translation of this (transliteration: "Az der bubbe volt gehat baytzim, volt zi geven mein zayde) and memorize it. This is the year.

Anyway, this is just empty rhetoric (but really, what that I say isn't?) to get to the point of this post, which is that I love the Yiddish language, or, in particular, its influence on English. Call it Yinglish, if you must. From this post comes a great reminder of the influence of Yiddish on English, and the way that, in particular, Yiddish's heavy focus on accent (as in, which syllable is stressed, rather 'Boston accent' kind of accent) allows the exact same set of words to have completely different meanings.

For instance, take the difference between (stealing openly from the post):

• I should buy two tickets for her concert? and
• I should buy two tickets for her concert?

Both of these express doubt about the conclusion that I should buy tickets, but the reason behind why I should buy the two tickets is completely different. 

In the first case, I shouldn't buy them because someone else should be buying them. Maybe the person I'm speaking to, maybe the person giving the concert, but somehow I have been wronged by the mere implication that I should be purchasing the tickets.

In the second case, it's doubtful that I should even buy one ticket to this concert; clearly, this artist is terrible, and it's offensive to imply that I'd even consider buying one ticket to this cruddy show, let alone two!

This emphasis on, well, emphasis opens up worlds of expressiveness, and makes both the speaking of language and, I'd imagine, the study of language much more entertaining, as well as useful. It's one of the reasons I enjoy writing, as well as talking.